Lineage II

Is anyone playing this game? I played the beta a little and was intrigued by it so I bought it, but admittedly have not spent much time with it.

I only play Second Life... you should too..

Soon. Stores in my area suck at getting stuff in. It could be a couple weeks yet.

I played it once when it was just about to launch...

Didn't seem too fun to me. Very linear progression. The prices for equipment, even simple newbie stuff, was in the several-thousand-gold range, whereas when you kill something you normally get around 5-6 gold for it. Yay treadmill :/

Plus there's little customization of characters (you can be a male dwarf, or a female dwarf, and that's it, for instance)... I dunno, seems like a faster-paced everquest without any point.

Not that EQ had a point, but still

LF

Wow. Made by the same company as City of Heroes, too.

Was it designed primarily to appeal to the Korean market?

It does seem NCSoft is churning out games all of the sudden. I would imagine they are acting just as the publisher, a la Electronic Arts. Lineage II and COH were developed by two different game studios, and the forthcoming Guild Wars, also from NCSoft, is from its subsidiary ArenaNet (which interestingly is made of up some of the founding members of Blizzard). NCSoft is an interesting company. They have gone from relative obscurity in the US to being the publisher of three highly anticipated games this year. Definitely a company to watch, though on the surface, it would seem that two major online game launches in the same week is spreading yourself a bit thin. As far as I can tell though, both launches have gone off without a hitch.

Cristiano

No, the game was designed to appeal to American players as well, which the original Lineage did not. However, it does appear that the Korean market is still primary - reading the forums for Lineage II, it seems there is a lot of discontent about the fact that the developers are Korean. To me, Lineage II feels like any other online RPG. I think the worst targetted RPG this year was Final Fantasy XI - which did feel very Japanese, too much so in my estimation for the American market. Lineage II is definitely more straightforward, but it definitely lacks the immediate immersion that City of Heroes has. They are two different games, granted - COH is without peer, whereas L2 is in a very crowded space of me too clones.

Cristiano

Lineage 2 is NOT for everyone, lots of griefing potential here. Now that the free beta is over it should lose a lot of that element. Unlike other NC Soft games the customer service in L2 has been lacking. Mainly because there are no North American devs for it. So fixing problems is a time consuming process. All NC Soft real does for L2 is translate the game, and run the NA servers. There were a LOT of complaints during the Open Beta about unfixed problems, but that was because OB was really more of a stress test for the servers. Most of the bugs have already been fixed in Chronicles 1, and will arrive in June. There was a patch at beginning of retail to fix some things. The main problem in OB was communication. The devs took forever to let you know anything. Anyway, my CD key just arrived today, so I will be loading it in a few.

Cris never listens to me.. *cry*